Pass-alive
A group is said to be pass-alive if it is impossible to capture even if the defender passes regardless of where and how often the attacker plays.
This term is preferred by some people to “unconditional life”, which is used by researchers to mean “pass-alive”, but is used to mean “alive without ko” in some other contexts such as tsume-go.
A pass-alive group is alive, but not every live group is pass-alive. Another way to define pass-alive is to say that the status of the group is alive and that no sequence of moves by the attacker only can change this.
There are no ko threats against a group that is pass-alive, not even ``n``-th level[1] ko threats. On the hand, if a group is alive but not pass-alive, there is, for some value of ``n``, an ``n``-th level ko threat against it.
Example
This group, although it is currently alive, is not pass-alive: If Black keeps passing, the group can be captured by White — after White plays at b and then at c it is dead; afterwards, moves at a and d will capture the group.
This group is not pass-alive; a is a 4th level threat to play the 3rd level threat b to play the 2nd level threat c to play the simple (son-ko) threat d.
Notes
RobertJasiek: For my Japanese 2003 Rules I had to to reformulate this concept. There the definition is:
- Consider a string of a player in a position. The string is pass-alive if for the hypothetical-strategy of the player that consists of only passes the opponent does not have any hypothetical-sequence that starts from the position, with the opponent, and has a capture of the string.
Note: This definition presumes some other definitions for the terms used therein.
Footnotes
[1] Here, for `` n geq 1``, an ``n``-th level threat is defined as a threat to make an ``(n-1)``th level threat, where a 1st level threat is a normal threat.
See also
- Benson's Definition of Unconditional Life — provides a static criterion for being pass-alive
- n-alive — Pass-alive is a limiting case of n-alive, known called by Robert Jasiek “*-alive” (though mathematicians might prefer “ω-alive”).
- PassDead - the opposite limiting case.